Oooh, I’m tired. I stayed up until 3 a.m. last nig…
Oooh, I’m tired. I stayed up until 3 a.m. last night working on a project and was woken up by the red glow of a particularly garish sunrise this morning. I had to come in early today to hand in the report anyway. As for my weekend, I worked on my book pretty much all of Saturday and most of Sunday, in spite of weather perfectly suited to exploring a new beach somewhere. All in all I wrote over 6,000 words this weekend, to make a total of 10,000 words over the past two weekends and a grand total of over 50,000 words. If I can keep this up I hope to be finished with the first draft of my book within a month. Then I can begin working on editing it into something worth publishing and, hopefully, even reading.
I arranged to meet Carl at Eslite on Sunday afternoon so we could go over a project I was working on for a tech company, but Carl was late (when isn’t he late? I don’t think he’s ever not been late, actually. He must run on indian time too), so I walked up and down the forest median of Dunhua S. Road, admiring the sunlight through the trees. Sooner or later the city will be out hacking most of the limbs off of all the trees in the city, since vegetation grows back so quickly here.
Carl arrived eventually and after we went down to the shops so that Carl could buy a rather expensive lamp, we arranged to meet Dean at an Italian restaurant nearby. We were walking over when I suddenly noticed a giant transparent animal of some sort, clinging to a water tower. The wind was causing it to move back and forth against the tower, making it look for all the world as if it were actually humping the structure.
We were discussing just how bizarre this seemed when Carl shouted “Oh, you cannot not take a picture of that!” Following his gaze, I saw a newly opened shop on a nearby corner. It appeared to be selling 70’s-style jackets and accessories, but the name of the shop struck me as a just bit off-color. It was called “Mother Fucker”. I don’t know exactly what that symbol in the middle is supposed to mean, but it doesn’t look too wholesome either.
Since we were on a roll as far as bizarre sights went, we decided to go take a picture of the “latter half” of a zebra which serves as a decidedly un-pedestrian pedestrian crossing light at the corner of Dunhua N. Road and Civic Boulevard. The really odd thing is that the other half of the zebra is nowhere in the vicinity. That’s really no way to treat a zebra.
Doug said he would be in Taipei some time this week, but I still haven’t been able to come to a decision on his offer. I don’t want to make the same kind of lateral move I made when I left the news, which was simply so bad I wasn’t very picky about where I went, just as long as it wasn’t the news. Such decisions tend to result in a long series of unsuitable jobs. I have to be reasonably sure that I’ll be happier at the magazine than I would be here, but so far I have no evidence of this one way or the other. If they would only delay the magazine’s debut for a few months, so that I could join full time after Chinese New Year’s, I would do it, since I wouldn’t be throwing away my new year’s bonus or annual leave. As it is, though, I’m still not quite convinced that it is worth giving all of that up. This is, of course, the way large companies get their people to work at unpleasant jobs. Carrot-and-stick? Or Fish-in-a-barrel?
